Friday, February 25, 2005

Surprise Sale Displaces Small Catholic Parish

'It was just out of the blue -- the church has been sold!' recalled Art Donegan, a member at the Catholic Church of the Holy Apostles who scrambled to rescue religious icons from the bulldozer.

"On the last day, it was announced from the altar that we were not to come back."

The decision to sell the 38-acre church property off Hypoluxo Road west of Military Trail to housing developer Ansca Homes came from a bishop of the New Jersey-based Byzantine rite, which owned the property.

"Holy Apostles is no longer a parish," explained The Rev. Glen Pothier, a priest in the Roman Catholic Church's larger and better-known Latin rite. "The parish has been dissolved."

Pothier is a canon lawyer at the Palm Beach Diocese, which has no jurisdiction over the local Byzantine rite. But because Pothier has been substituting at Mass since the last Holy Apostles priest died three years ago, he jumped in to help the elderly church members of mostly Hungarian, Ukrainian and Russian descent find a temporary location for church services after their ouster.